I Hate You, Internet

Posted on February 10, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 50 Comments

Among other various email addresses I’ve collected over the years, I was one of the first to sign up for Gmail, so I actually snagged my name – sjennings.

This has not been terribly useful to me.

Why? Because, apparently, everyone who shares my first initial and last name thinks it’s their Gmail address. Thus, at any given point, I can pop this email account open and read job offers, requests for insurance seminars, Facebook status updates, and notes from their husbands that they are working late this evening.

I am apparently the Gmail vector for everyone s and jennings.

So Shaun, Suzie, Steve, Sara, Shane, Shay, Sue, Sheila? Would it be too much to actually figure out which email address you have before giving it out to people? Sheila, I’m glad you’re getting married but I don’t really want to see pictures of your dress or the approximately 500 bridal magazines you’ve signed up for. Stephen, I’m pretty sure buying her chocolate isn’t going to help. Shakira, did you really need to sign up for InterRacialDating.com using the wrong email address? And Steve, all the newsletters for ammunition are kind of creeping me out here. Plus, your wife Ellen wants you to know the meeting with the therapist is at 4:00 PM. You should probably go.

I’m pretty sure that checking this email account every so often makes me a bad person.

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  • Raad

    And the porn advert in 5…4…3…

  • Vetarnias

    Lucky man; while the rest of us have to be content with counting the number of pitiful PayPal phishing attempts (note to scammers: a lowercase L, in a serif font, is by no means identical to a capital I), you find a way to be the center of gossip at the next Jennings family reunion. You truly lead a charmed life.

    P.S.: I enjoyed your latest MMORPG.com column on Star Trek, but why no link from here yet?

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    You could probably sell it for a decent sum. Not sure if gmail allows that though.

  • Bo

    I have the same thing- the best was the day I got an “it was so great to meet you on the cruise liner last week, I’m lonely, fly out to my city and let’s, well, you know” email and a prescription renewal for Valtrex on the same day for some gentleman who has a similar name to mine. Luckily he does not share my name, or my wife would never have believed me when I made her come laugh at it with me.

  • Baldrake

    You need to check out:

    http://wrongkmiller.wordpress.com/

  • Aufero

    Fortunately, the first email address I signed up for on Gmail was for a character name in an MMO I was playing at the time. By the time I got around to my real name, the convoluted series of letters that were left usable with the last name “Martin” couldn’t be mistaken for a personal email address by anyone who speaks English.

    Not that it stops the spammers for an instant.

  • Technogeek

    I have a similar problem, though not quite to that degree. My Gmail address is the username listed above, which leads to me getting emails meant for others at least once a week.

    I also got signed up for Masaru Emoto’s newsletter at some point, which I think may annoy me more than the other stuff.

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    One nice thing about using my handle “geldonyetich” for a lot of services I use is I tend to avoid such misunderstanding. The name is actually a bit of a deliberate bit of goobilygook to avoid such mistakes, and any imitators must bear the stigma of labeling themselves with such madness.

  • http://hive05.com Lounges

    I regularly get email for someone with the same name as me who thinks this was his email.

    I usually respond with something filthy and CC his real email address. This usually pisses him off a lot.

    One year his wife sent me their tax return info thinking it was going to him instead.

  • Vetarnias

    I have always wondered where “geldonyetich” came from. But I think I have, at last, cracked the mystery.

    The first word that grabs my attention amid this smorgasbord of letters is “yeti”, which confirms that you must be an Abominable Snowman. However, if we pick the word “yeti” out of your name, we are left with the letters “ch” at the end, which my sublime intellect at once recognizes as the internet suffix of Confederatio Helvetica, in other words, Switzerland. It is also proper that even though the Himalayas, whence the yetis dwell, are not to be found in Switzerland, the country benefits from the presence of another well-known mountain chain. Ergo, you are obviously an Abominable Snowman from the Alps.

    That leaves us with “geldon”. It is here that I remember that “geld” is German for “money”; and as it happens, German is an official language of Switzerland. That leaves us with “on”, which I will have to assume is either the French indefinite third-person pronoun (French being, obviously, another official language of Switzerland), or the English word. While subscribing to the former theory would undoubtedly clinch my acceptance by MENSA, syntactical considerations force me, reluctantly, to go with the latter.

    Unless, naturally, it actually reads “gel don”, “gel” obviously being French for “freeze”, which points in the direction of a glacier, of which Switzerland has many. That leaves us with the “don”, which could be either an English verb, a Spanish title of nobility, the French word for “donation”, or a reference to the Italian Mafia. Of these, despite the French red herring, I would go with the very last, Italian being, of course, yet another official language of Switzerland.

    The final piece of the puzzle is embedded in the politics of global warming, of which a consequence is the melting of glaciers. As such, we can see how the need for “cornering the market” on glaciers, as a commodity growing scarcer by the day, has become imperative. And who could be more qualified for the job than the Mafia, and better still, a Mafia headed by an Abominable Snowman from the Alps? “Geldon”, thus, takes on a double significance in your case, first as a Mafia boss of the glaciers (“gel don”), second as a man who financially benefited from his position, as demonstrated by your being showered with money (“geld on”).

    Hmm, all this logical reasoning is giving me a headache. And maybe all the materials for an academic paper somewhere in the humanities.

  • Korak

    All of my names are in the Top 10(in America) for both gender names and last names but I rarely get spam email.

    The truth is someone you pissed off at some point in the last 10 years is purposely trolling the account. It’s the most logical explanation.

  • Korak

    Haha, Technogeek I always wondered why you kept that name. It’s just asking for trouble. Eight million “Do I know you?” /tells when you do anything online.

  • Harper

    Someone signed up their FB with my RL email address. She couldn’t spell her own name apparently. So I am going to be committing FB suicide for her soon….
    http://www.suicidemachine.org/

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    @Vetarnias

    Ah, you’ve made my ego very happy. But the truth is that long ago I was playing a Battletech MU* and was tasked to come up with a character name.

    I largely picked Geldon Yetichsky out of the air, perhaps as a complement of Jason Youngblood. Who knows?

    Knowing what I do about Japanese culture now, it was a very strange name indeed for a Draconis Combine character. Maybe House Steiner or Davion.

    Later I just merged it into a single thing which you see today. Little did I know I was creating an incredible optical illusion that would be oft read as Golden something.

  • http://www.psychochild.org/ Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green

    Email confusion is nothing new to me. As I’ve said before, I keep my pirate name “Psychochild” because there are so many other Brian Greens out there. In college I got fanmail for another Brian Green. I’m sure a college guy getting email from teenaged girls in the mid 90′s put me on some sort of federal watchlist.

    I get the mystery email on gmail, too. I’ve always guessed that it’s someone putting down an email when signing up for something then figuring they’ll go register the email address later.

  • http://www.battlevortex.com Fear

    I hear that Lum The Mad gets less spam…

  • EpicSquirt

    :-)

  • Walt Y

    Believe it or not, my short_bus email also lives an interesting double, triple, nay, quadruple life as well.

    It even had a facebook account going for a while there when I refused to use Facebook.

  • Richard Campbell

    I have the exact same problem with my yahoo email, although thankfully I used my full name so I don’t get every R Campbell out there.

  • http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com Andrew

    There are least two other Andrew Andersons who gave out my email as their own for quite a while. One is deployed somewhere in Europe for the US military, and I was getting some fairly confidential looking emails for him that I’m certain the military wouldn’t appreciate me having.

    I had to set up a GMail filter to auto-file any emails that came to my address without a dot between the first name and last name, as that’s the variant both of the other guys used.

  • Sean

    This recently became a big issue for me. A similar Sean gave my email address to all of his colleagues (mine is first.last @ and his is first.m.last @), so I averaged about 20 emails a day that were work related until I fixed the issue.

    His boss did a reply all and added the correct Sean telling him “You Fail”. So that was worth it.

  • Iconic

    IMO Raph Koster is pranking Scott.

  • Zuzax

    Just use your email replies to constantly point everyone to MMORPG.com. I’m guessing interest in your email will slow down.

  • M.H. Williams

    My name is M. Williams. You can guess the fun emails I get for that one.

  • http://foolsage.wordpress.com foolsage

    I feel your pain. The company I work for has had an email domain for around 13 years now. There’s another company with a similar name in another state (they aren’t competitors so we didn’t get snarky about the name), and for some reason the idiot there have mistakenly believed that they had our domain name for the last decade or so. We get personal emails, work emails, job offers, angry customer diatribes, you name it, all directed to this other company. Protip: using (your name) @ random domain name does NOT constitute a valid email address. Morons.

  • Hatch

    Standard response:

    You’ve reached the wrong sjennings. I’m the sjennings that sends you an image of goatse every time you email me. Be sure to remember me in the future, because if it happens again I’m going tubgirl on you, and you do not want that!

    :goatse image:

  • Vetarnias

    @Geldon

    Glad to hear. I was afraid for a minute, that I made a mistake in reading “gel don yeti ch” where I should have read “gel do nyet ich”, where “gel” would have been a reference to the Cold War, “nyet”, obviously, to Khrushchev, and “ich” to Germany, viz. the erection of the Berlin Wall.

  • bonedead
  • Alex

    I get this too, I get mails from Mercedes of Memphis telling me my mercedes is due for a service. I didn’t know I had a mercedes in memphis.

    I’ve had powerpoint presentations from large companies, and all sorts of other wierdness.

  • Slyfeind

    “Slyfeind” for the win. I get lots of spam from “Slyfiend” though.

  • Boanerges

    @bonedead
    I think you just did. Auto-hyperlink ftw. Spam bots should be around in 3… 2…

    This is why I own my own domain. Little chance of confusion. Oddly enough I had my first yesterday and I have first.last for an uncommon name to boot.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    My name starts with J.

  • http://www.puyc.blogspot.com/ Vetarnias

    I’m just wondering, though, whether the people to whom those messages were intended ever realized their mistake and contacted you (or threatened you, etc.). I’m also not certain whether Scott’s post, although funny, might not violate existing privacy laws. After all, he is giving their names, and the contents of emails that were not intended for him.

  • bonedead

    If there wasn’t a disclosure notice in the email, I think he’ll be alright.

  • TPRJones

    Scott, you are a better man than I. I couldn’t resist the urge to pretend to be them and screw with everyone that emailed incorrectly.

    I wonder just how many marriages you could destroy.

  • JuJutsu

    TPRJones :Scott, you are a better man than I. I couldn’t resist the urge to pretend to be them and screw with everyone that emailed incorrectly.
    I wonder just how many marriages you could destroy.

    Would you really want to mess with someone that gets ammunition newsletters?

  • TylerDurden

    JuJutsu :

    TPRJones :Scott, you are a better man than I. I couldn’t resist the urge to pretend to be them and screw with everyone that emailed incorrectly.
    I wonder just how many marriages you could destroy.

    Would you really want to mess with someone that gets ammunition newsletters?

    Are you kidding? That’s exactly who you’d want to mess with.

    I thought there were a bunch of Slashdot nerds here, how do you people not know how to troll!!!

  • Cedia

    I was always thankful for my very ethnic name that nobody can spell correctly. And then I had to go and marry a Taylor… :(

  • http://dsob.wordpress.com geldonyetich

    TylerDurden :

    JuJutsu :

    TPRJones :Scott, you are a better man than I. I couldn’t resist the urge to pretend to be them and screw with everyone that emailed incorrectly.
    I wonder just how many marriages you could destroy.

    Would you really want to mess with someone that gets ammunition newsletters?

    Are you kidding? That’s exactly who you’d want to mess with.
    I thought there were a bunch of Slashdot nerds here, how do you people not know how to troll!!!

    Thank God y’all reached me. I got this here offer from Dick Chaney to shut down taxes for life and I’m alookin’ for funding. Just transfer this here lump sum of $500 for this PayPal account and we’ll live like Rockafellers. Thanks, bud, I’ll buy ya a beer later.

  • Angelworks

    I have the exact same problem with my gmail account for the same reason. Some guy even attached his bank account to my address so I get his finances.

  • Scott

    Wow, I thought this was unique to me! I have a fairly obscure email address, but still get emails for a few other people.

  • brent

    My only email doppleganger of note is a guy who has (myusername)@ap.org.

    I get cc:’d a lot of stuff about human rights abuses in Vietnam. Go crusading reporters!

  • http://www.slydesblog.com Slyde
  • Kyverl

    I was an early AOL user and had an unusual first name as my handle. This was all well and good until I began receiving unsolicited naked photos with requests that I return same. I like naked pictures about as much as everyone else and could live with an occasional message that needed to go straight to delete, but my doppleganger got me on a distribution list with attachments that purported to contain naked photos of teens.

    Now, naked pictures of children is something I do not want to receive. Moreover, I was aware, via an EJF-sponsored mailing list, that the FBI was rumored to be monitoring AOL for a child porn sting operation.

    The customer service people at AOL were unresponsive to my requests that they identify my doppleganger and make him or her change their name. They didn’t seem to care one whit that I was receiving unsolicited photos that might be child pornography. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to open any of them to check.

    I decided that if AOL didn’t care about stopping people from sending me unsolicited kiddie porn, I didn’t really need AOL.

    Let’s hope your gmail buddies don’t develop a taste for anything of dubious legality.

  • Exeter

    While my gmail account appears immune, amongst other things, my wife has been sent real estate listings, notes from brainstorming sessions for marketing campaigns and an email from a woman who was obviously upset with her current relationship.

  • http://www.darrensingleton.com Darren Singleton

    You aren’t the only person having this problem with GMail. I’m constantly having people by the name of David, Donna and Dina Singleton using my email address to sign up for MySpace, LinkedIn and then also getting sent holiday snaps from friends and job interview confirmations.

    It gets really annoying and it seems that there is nothing that can be done besides changing my own email address (not something I’m currently willing to do).

    Regards,
    Darren

  • http://REPLYME MRS ROSE MARY

    Dear Beloved,
    I apologize if the contents in this mail are contrary to your moral ethics, which I feel may be of great disturbance to your personal life, but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal and I pray that this email reaches you in the best of health.

    I pray God that this message reaches you in wonderful spirit as I am making this contact with you based on trust and confidence irrespective of the fact that we have not met before and because of the nature of the situation I found myself. I got your contact from web through personal endeavour  and decided to contact. I believe my contacting you is not an ordinary coincidence because God can use any body known or unknown to accomplish great things which he has ordained.

    I am Rose Marry, I was hospitalize after I had a car accident with my family, I lost my husband and my two daughters who were also on board in the accident. After the accident, I have been battling with some health problems from the major injuries that I sustained in the cause of accident.

    Recently, my doctor told me that I have some few months to live due the surgery that was conducted.Though what disturbs is my presence predicament, due to the injuries that I sustained and damaged of my spinal cords in the accident. Having known my condition, I have decided to Willing/Donate the sum of $5.5 Million(Five Million,Five hundred thousand Dollars) to charity and individual through you for the good work of the lord, and to help the motherless, less privileged and also for the assistance of the widows. Because I am the only surviving person and nobody else that will inherit this money because they are now dead. I don’t want a situation whereby this deposit will be confiscated and declared unserviceable by the officials of the finance company where it was deposited by my late husband who used to work with shell development company as an engineer before his death.

    All I want you to do is to assist in safe-keep of this fund valued at US$5.5 Million United States Dollars deposited at the custody of the security firm before it gets confiscated or declared un-serviceable.I seek your consent to present you as the Trustee to my late husband’s inheritance, so that the proceeds of this account can be paid to you.If you are interested in carrying out this task, I want you to contact me immediately, so that I can arrange all the modalities to effect the release of the fund to you. I know I have never met you but my mind tells me to do this, and I hope you will act sincerely. I have also decided that 30% of this money should be taken by you from the total sum upon the success release of this fund, because I am now too weak and fragile to do things myself because of my present health problems.

    I have been given 21 working days by the finance company for the collection of the deposited item before it will be confiscated. I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the task is accomplished, as I don’t want anything that will Jeopardize my last wish.

    Kindly furnish me your full name and your address also your contact number, so that I will prepare all relevant documents with the assistance of our family lawyer to effect the release of the fund to you.
    reply me to my private email; [email protected]
    Yours faithfully,
    Mrs. Rose Marry.

  • http://REPLYME MRS ROSE MARY

    Dear Beloved,
    I apologize if the contents in this mail are contrary to your moral ethics, which I feel may be of great disturbance to your personal life, but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal and I pray that this email reaches you in the best of health.

    I pray God that this message reaches you in wonderful spirit as I am making this contact with you based on trust and confidence irrespective of the fact that we have not met before and because of the nature of the situation I found myself. I got your contact from web through personal endeavour  and decided to contact. I believe my contacting you is not an ordinary coincidence because God can use any body known or unknown to accomplish great things which he has ordained.

    I am Rose Marry, I was hospitalize after I had a car accident with my family, I lost my husband and my two daughters who were also on board in the accident. After the accident, I have been battling with some health problems from the major injuries that I sustained in the cause of accident.

    Recently, my doctor told me that I have some few months to live due the surgery that was conducted.Though what disturbs is my presence predicament, due to the injuries that I sustained and damaged of my spinal cords in the accident. Having known my condition, I have decided to Willing/Donate the sum of $5.5 Million(Five Million,Five hundred thousand Dollars) to charity and individual through you for the good work of the lord, and to help the motherless, less privileged and also for the assistance of the widows. Because I am the only surviving person and nobody else that will inherit this money because they are now dead. I don’t want a situation whereby this deposit will be confiscated and declared unserviceable by the officials of the finance company where it was deposited by my late husband who used to work with shell development company as an engineer before his death.

    All I want you to do is to assist in safe-keep of this fund valued at US$5.5 Million United States Dollars deposited at the custody of the security firm before it gets confiscated or declared un-serviceable.I seek your consent to present you as the Trustee to my late husband’s inheritance, so that the proceeds of this account can be paid to you.If you are interested in carrying out this task, I want you to contact me immediately, so that I can arrange all the modalities to effect the release of the fund to you. I know I have never met you but my mind tells me to do this, and I hope you will act sincerely. I have also decided that 30% of this money should be taken by you from the total sum upon the success release of this fund, because I am now too weak and fragile to do things myself because of my present health problems.

    I have been given 21 working days by the finance company for the collection of the deposited item before it will be confiscated. I will appreciate your utmost confidentiality in this matter until the task is accomplished, as I don’t want anything that will Jeopardize my last wish.

    Kindly furnish me your full name and your address also your contact number, so that I will prepare all relevant documents with the assistance of our family lawyer to effect the release of the fund to you.
    reply me to my private email; [email protected]
    Yours faithfully,
    Mrs. Rose Marry.

  • Merlyn

    I’ve got the same problem…of course, what’s even better is some of my namesakes seem to like signing up for new gmail accounts using my email as the secondary address…

    So i go and delete their brand new gmail accounts…

    But, I’ve had apartment contracts, resumes, family photos, teenage giggling girl comments, and downloadable software purchase links sent to me (last one was fun, I got a full photo-editing suite out of it).

    At one point, I even tracked down one of the people who was doing it, and when I contacted them, they threatened to call the police on me for “hacking their email”…(still haven’t heard from the cops on that one yet…)

  • http://www.implicitlife.com ImplicitLife

    I actually found out I had cousin through this same mistake. My google email address differed from hers by a single letter at the start. My last name is pretty rare, so when i recieved a forwarded email from a similar address saying “here’s the graduation pictures that were mistakenly delivered to me” I sent back an email asking about the last name. With the help of fbook we connected and now i got 3 new cousins.